There’s No Such Thing as a Stupid Question, Except ‘What’s a Question?’

When you grow older some truisms and sayings seem to crumble under scrutiny. I remember teachers always saying, “There’s no such thing as a stupid question.” Of course as an adult I’ve realized not only is there such thing as a stupid question, but in reality most questions turn out to be stupid.

I now suspect teachers knew this and were purposely encouraging a culture of stupid questions in order to increase their chances of winning a teacher pool in which teachers would present the stupidest questions of the day and vote on who had the dumbest students.

If I’d stopped to think about this as a kid, it probably would have only taken me a few seconds to respond to the teachers with an indisputably stupid question:

“Okay, class, any questions? And remember, there’s no such thing as a stupid question.”
My hand would shoot up.
“Yes, Paul? You have a question?”
“Yeah. What’s a question?”

I realize now that a slight amount of shame at asking stupid questions can be healthy because it forces us to try a little harder to find the answer ourselves instead of doing our thinking out loud and saying everything we think as soon as we think it.

My 8-year-old, The Fonz, seems like a pretty bright kid, but he does ask his fair share of non-intelligent questions. I won’t call them stupid questions—because his mom might randomly choose today as the day she reads a post to feign interest in my blog—but he certainly asks a lot of questions that collectively cast doubt on any career prospects as a detective.

We have some version of the following conversation three or four times a day: I’ll be sitting at the table eating a sandwich and he’ll walk into the room and ask:

“What are you doing?”
I’ll stare at him for a moment with a blank expression, then turn my gaze to the hand holding my sandwich, then I look at him again, then I look again at the sandwich, and I finally answer, “Playing with Legos.”
He raises an eyebrow. “No you’re not. You’re eating a sandwich.”
“If you could tell I was eating a sandwich, why’d you ask what I was doing?”
His mouth opens but produces no sound.

If I enter the house wearing a wet swimsuit with a towel over my shoulder, he asks:

“Hey, Dad, where have you been?”
“I was playing golf.”
“But you didn’t take your clubs.”
“I guess that explains why I played so badly.”

If I come down the stairs in gym shoes, shorts, and a tank top, with a gym bag slung over my shoulder, and I open the front to leave, he asks:

“Going somewhere?”
“Why do you think I might be going somewhere? Is it because I opened the door and started to go through it?”
His eyes take in the gym bag. “Are you going to the gym?”
“I’m going to a wedding.”
“Who’s getting married?”
“Your mother. I’m hoping when she sees me in this tank top she’ll change her mind.”

I realize he’s just thinking out loud. He sees me going through the door and he knows that means I’m leaving, but instead of his brain registering the information ‘Dad is leaving’ a short-circuit inverts the first two words and he states, “Is Dad leaving?”

We’ll keep working with him and feel confident he’ll someday grow into a competent questioner. On the other hand, writing this post has reminded me how often I knock on the bathroom door while my wife is inside and and ask, “What are you doing?”

I’d ask for your recommendations on training The Fonz through this Achilles’ heel but now I’m afraid of asking a stupid question.

…..

If you need help disguising the limitations of a dense child, you might find the following posts useful:

Every Thanksgiving my younger son would ask “What are we having for dinner?” Every year I told him “Iguana” or “Tiger” or some other creature…Now he tells his children such tall tales I cannot even believe some of them…

Great post. I have the same problem and anytime my children, especially when they are that age, I just keep quiet to give them a little chance to figure out or rethink and most of the time they get it. If they don’t sometime it is so annoying that I say: don’t you see or what do you think I am doing. Recently, I told my daughter: allow me to tell you that your question is stupid . Then I remember all my teacher who ever said that there was no stupid question.Thank you for posting this

Perhaps these are wise questions in disguise..maybe the Fonz is politely trying to posit whether you really need the sandwich you are eating, if going to the gym in a tank top is really your best look or is the wetsuit revealing more than you should be comfortable with…just sayin’….The kid might just be a super sensitive man in the making…;-)

Understood – that’s why I thought you could use the ammunition. Next time he asks you a question which on its face appears stupid, just hug him and tell him he’s a wonderful kid and thank him for loving you so much.

My husband, who is an extremely analytical problem solver (he’s one of the Cisco guys making sure our electronic devices can handle video downloads), habitually enters a room with the question, “What’d ya say?” Obviously, I said nothing. Usually there is nothing that needs said. This appears to be his way of indicating, “I’m here. You’re here. We’re both people occupying the same physical space.” In my personal experience, software developers fall into this category of super nice and interesting folks who happen to have very limited and/or condensed social skills. So while it’s not really a smart question, I totally support the theory that it means The Fonz has a super smart mind.

I think we all have an instinct to blurt out what we are thinking. Having a close-knit bunch of friends who laugh at you mercilessly every time you ask a silly question in class should take care or at least tame the instinct.

Hahahaha, I cannot wait to be the type of parent who casually messes with my kids on a daily basis. In the long run, I think you’re helping because you’re just helping him develop his logical thinking!

They say the only dumb question is the one that doesn’t get asked. I disagree. I’ve forgotten to ask “Are you on the pill?” “Is this dry-clean only?” “Can I get extra cheese?” and those are all great questions!

Completely disappointed that you haven’t used the “I know what you’re doing, but what am I doing?” response. Amateur. (Said by the lady who doesn’t have kids)

Why is it that every time you answer him, your answer is more interesting than the thing you’re actually doing? Maybe he’s just trying to lead you down the path of self-enlightenment to realize that you WOULD rather be playing legos than eating a sandwich. Maybe he’s brilliant. And hungry. Maybe he’s brilliant and hungry and this is his way of improving your life WHILE stealing your sandwich. And composing a self-help book. That, my friend, is one diabolical little multi-tasker you’ve got there.

Knocking on the bathroom door and asking “whatcha doin?” at least offers the inhabitant the opportunity to craft an answer such that the knocker will never ask that stupid question again.

What I hate is the same situation where the knocker asks “Who’s in there?” Why? Why do you care who’s in there? Are you trying to gauge the length of time this particular facility will be occupied based on the hygienic habits of the inhabitant? Trying to take a head-count of the household?

They say the best way to train something is to reinforce good behavior. This means whenever the Fonz realizes his error you should give him a treat, like a spoonful of peanut butter.

Using negative reinforcement to discourage bad behavior is less effective but can also be helpful, so the next time he asks a stupid question perhaps you could spray him with water from a spray bottle.

My dad had those same kinds of responses to my dumb questions as a kid. And just think, if I only had to repeat my sophomore year of high school 3 times, the Fonz will be golden!! I’m sure he’ll only have to repeat it once or twice – he seems like a pretty bright kid. 😉

I love your blog and would like to write a witty remark some day, but I actually have a serious response this time. It sounds like your son is an extrovert, more inclined to process ideas out loud, and his rhetorical questions are simply his way of acknowledging your existence when he doesn’t have anything more compelling on his mind. As an educator and an extrovert myself, I can predict that he will probably need to talk through his ideas in lots of situations, and sometimes (like in a classroom) that could be perceived as disruptive (albeit unintentional). Skilled teachers can use Think-Pair-Share to channel extroverts more productively; hopefully your son will encounter good teachers. Growing up, I often struggled to write papers until I realized that when my mother came into the room and said, “What are you trying to write?” I could explain it out loud easily. So then I started talking to myself, and the writing flowed smoothly. Hope this helps.

I think you’re right. When I’m struggling to write something I may ask my wife for help and I figure out the solution just by explaining it. At the end of my explanation she starts to suggest a solution but I’ve already figured it out.

lol hey i have a feeling your wife is going to read this post and then there is not what you write but what you meant..big trouble..

you wont believe but i have been asked by a grown up who saw me watching Television and then asked me if i was.
and then there are times i am working on a computer and suddenly someone will come and ask hey are you on computer?
somedays more people will ask me the same and i have doubts on what i am doing at that moment or the computer is visible to others or not

Just wait for the teenage years: you’ll be the one asking “where are you going?”, while it will be obvious that he’ll be going out to score some beer and smoke weed. And I believe the appropriate response to such a ‘stupid question’ will be “duh…” (unless it’s been replaced by a newer “coolism”).

As stupid as some questions may appear on the surface, their answers have much greater potential for stupiditude, especially when truthful. To illustrate the point, here’s an actual question posed to me when I was at the tender age of 17…

“Do you know how fast you were going?” This was followed by the opinion, “You must have been doing 90 mph in this 25 zone!”

A stupid answer would have been, “Actually, Officer, I hit 122.”

Stupider by an order of magnitude would have been to add the following question to the previous answer, “Just what were you and your partner doing while parked behind the bushes in the middle of the night with your radar and lights turned off, huh?”

The Fonz may not need to be corrected in his incompetent questioning… maybe he just has a knack for law enforcement.

My husband does this to me constantly. I am sweating up a storm while walking on the treadmill, and he walks in, looks at me, and asks what I am doing. Clearly I am curing cancer while cooking dinner, so I communicate that to him. Please have your son call my husband so they can have significant discourse about the confusion of the obvious. The good news is that your boy is 8. Gotta love em. 😉

“Why did I get an F?” Hmmm. “Well Jeffry you have 29 absences, 11 grades of 36 ,3 of which were not F’s, 15 tardies, did no homework, and turned in no project.” You cannot believe how many conversations such as these I had over the 34 years in the classroom. I was never the type to to use a calculator to figure grades. A meant real good, B equaled pretty good, and C meant alright.